Friday, October 31, 2014

Halloween 2014: From the P&PC Vault: An Interview with Ryan Mecum (Originally Posted September 18, 2010)

In September of 2010, Ryan Mecum's Werewolf Haiku—the third installment in a series of illustrated "horrorku" volumes including Zombie Haiku and Vampire Haiku—hit bookstores around the nation. Earlier in 2010, P&PC correspondent Ce Rosenow reviewed the first two collections which you can find here and here, but to mark the coming of Werewolf Haiku, we thought it about time to track down Mecum himself. Whether or not the new book is exactly to your lycan—er, liking—we think you'll find something to chew on in the following conversation.

Poetry & Popular Culture: How and when did you realize that horror haiku would be your metier?

Ryan Mecum: It all happened one bored and stupid night when I mixed a 5-7-5 syllable stanza with a voice moaning for brains and my wife rolled her eyes. At the very moment her eyes reached the height of their rolling, I knew I had evolved English literature to a new peak. Then came Jonathan Franzen and ruined everything.

RM: Without a doubt, he upped the game of zombie fiction. I consider Seth Grahame- Smith to be my ultimate nemesis. I see his creativity as a direct threat to mine. I actually had the chance to attack him last summer at Comic-Con, but he escaped through the crowd. A bystander was able to snap a photo of the carnage (presented here). Seth Grahame-Smith, if you are reading this blog, consider this an OFFICIAL INVITE to fight to the death and then keep fighting until we are just nubs and stumps.

P&PC: What type of apprenticeship did you undergo to prepare for these books?

RM: My training was mainly a steady diet of zombie comics and Frankenberry cereal. I did study under some wonderful poetry professors while at the University of Cincinnati, but I'm sure they'd rather I not mention them by name (right, John Drury and Andrew Hudgins?). I'm sure they wouldn't remember me, but they were both highly influential on my falling for poetry. I grew up finding poetry difficult and annoying. These teachers both introduced me to poems that were instantly fun. So, to answer your question, none.

P&PC: Why haiku and not another form like scary sonnets or violent villanelles—or even goulish ghazals?

RM: I tried a werewolf sonnet once. It just about killed me. I respect Dylan Thomas too much to make a mockery of the villanelle, but I did once write a zombie haiku as if it were written by Thomas. "Do not go gentle / into that zombie plagued night. / And take the shotgun." Some people have suggested limericks, and I've wanted to punch them.

P&PC: Can you describe the process of putting the books together?

RM: Step one is picking a monster whose voice I think would be fun to narrate poetry. Once I've got that, I do a story outline and then try to connect the dots via haiku after haiku. I usually jump into the stories somewhat blind as to where I'm heading, with hopes that I can quickly get somewhere fun. And by "fun" I mean "gross."

P&PC: What are some classic influences that you'd recommend?

RM: For zombies, I'd recommend my wretched nemesis Seth Grahame-Smith for his genius Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. For vampires, Stoker's Dracula. For werewolves, Toby Barlow's epic werewolf poem/novel Sharp Teeth was mind-blowing. One poetry book I always recommend is After The Lost War, by Andrew Hudgins.

P&PC: How are audiences responding to all of this grossness?

RM: So far so good. Both books seemed to do well critically, which is nice. The books are selling, which is allowing me the opportunity to write more. People seem to enjoy their zombie poetry more than their vampire poetry (who knew?). Werewolf Haiku was just released, so it's a bit soon to know if that will find an audience, but I'm optimistic because it's disgusting.

Most of my friends and family are confused there is an audience at all for a book like Zombie Haiku. However, there are a devout few, like myself, who were confused that it took this long for a book of zombie haiku. There is one guy who has reviewed two of my books on Amazon who is NOT a fan because he doesn't think my books help the growing field of "horrorku." For some reason, that makes me smile.

P&PC: Why do you think people are so obsessed with zombies, vampires and werewolves at the current time?

RM: They are safely scary. Stories like The Road are so terrifying because deep down all of us think this might happen. Zombie and vampire stories push us far enough out of the realm of reality that they become a bit more fun. The Road was a zombie story without zombies, and that freaked me out. If Cormac McCarthy had added just one zombie, that book would have been a lot more fun and the movie would have been more popular than The Book Of Eli. Contemporary audiences would rather their horror be unrealistic. Enter zombies and vampires.

P&PC: So, what's the profit margin in horror haiku?

RM: I am richer than Edgar Allan Poe was when he died, so I must be doing something right.

P&PC: That probably also means you're not eating soap.

RM: Only when I cuss.

P&PC: Is the series, uh, dead, or is there another installment on the way?

RM: I'm currently at work on a whole new concept for a zombie-themed haiku book that is sure to both entertain and disgust.

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About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry